Shortcat - Keyboard productivity app for Mac OS X
shortcatapp.com
shortcatapp.com
If you do use the app and it crashes, please send a crash report and a short description what you were doing. It helps me a lot figuring out what the problem is. I post up known issues at https://trello.com/board/shortcat-bugs/51ac6a3711f6b34606001... (public Trello board) so people can vote and comment on issues.
I strongly suggest reading the README as I haven't baked in a tutorial to the app just yet.
Bug report: http://i.imgur.com/wTwXpx2.png
(your "reply" link isn't highlighted, but all others are)
That's quite odd... WebViews are a hard beast to figure out cause web pages generally contain quite a few elements (sometimes 20k+), which makes it rather annoying to search and deal with. Chrome with the --force-accessibility-renderer flag has issues with element positions due to caching (I think). Safari has much better support but it's a tiny bit slower than Chrome. Right now, I'm focusing on other features. Hopefully browsers get better!
How do I pay you for it? :-)
I've had it installed a while now and found that I almost never use it -- surprisingly.
One thing you could support to fix that: why can't I click on the menu bar of an application?
One thing that annoys me: whenever I cylce through open applications with cmd-tab, shortcat is there.
"Shortcat -- killing mice, one at a time."
is just genius. Super-kudos to whoever came up with that.
Demand for accessible apps increases -> I become more productive and apps become more accessible for people that need them. Perfect!
Can you guys add a feature that flashes on the screen the keyboard shortcut that already exist for an action performed via the mouse?
Even better if you can add a threshold for an action. For a trivial example, imagine just going to the edit menu and choosing cut/paste/copy. If I perform that action more often than once every 10 minutes, shortcat would flash a fairly large overlay on my screen showing me that shortcut. You could even make this progressive. First teach me any shortcuts for any action performed every 5 minutes for a particular application. Once I learn all those actions, expand the threshold one minute at a time until I learn a new action. Once I consistently perform those actions within the threshold via the keyboard, further increase the threshold until I learn all the commands.
How much do you plan on charging?
If you limited it to clicking the menus in the top where the shortcuts are defined, it's more doable but I personally didn't see much merit in that since I'm terrible at memorising keyboard shortcuts anyway.. :)
Right now, I've implemented maybe 10% of the features I want to add. I'll be adding licensing soon, but given that most people probably wouldn't pay for features that's not there, I'm probably going to start at $12, then bump it whenever I ship a major feature. Early adopters will end up saving a bit.
The licensing will be cheaper when it's in beta too.
Might I suggest checking out the Van Westerndorp approach to pricing a product intelligently to make you the most revenue?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp's_Price_Sensitiv...
Shortcat seems like a great complement to shortcutFoo! Very cool idea.
(disclaimer: I created shortcutFoo)
I noticed the mention of the "regions" feature in the README, so maybe you already have plans for solving this, but one thing I'd love would be to have a way to select something based in part on its proximity to something else. For example, imagine I want to click on the comments link for a particular story on the HN front page. It'd be more intuitive to me to type, say, "Shortcat#comments" to pick the item that matches "comments" nearest the item that matches "Shortcat", than to type "comments" and hit Control to select the correct link.
Regions needs a bit more thought, but it'll let you narrow down the search space easier when you're using a complex app like Xcode with a billion different scrollviews.
That's actually a pretty cool idea! I had ideas for sorting by depth in the element tree to current active or moused over element, but a proximity-based search would be interesting. What operator would you think is meaningful? I haven't got plans for '#' just yet.
DNS Points to Prohibited IP You've requested a page on a website (shortcatapp.com) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, it is resolving to an IP address that is creating a conflict within CloudFlare's system. If you are the owner of this website, you should login to CloudFlare and change the DNS A records for shortcatapp.com to resolve to a different IP address.
Timestamp: Fri, 07-Jun-13 22:40:20 GMT
Requested URL: shortcatapp.com/0
Error reference number: 1000
Server ID: FL_29F5
Process ID: PID_1370644820.240-1-3281482
Edited to remove my personal info.
Any chance of defining a custom selection key other than ctrl? On my Macbook air, holding the control key with my pinky or thumb while I type is really awkward. Shift would seem more natural, as the pinky finger is already used to using this as a modifier, no?
Hmm, probably. I used to use Shift but the problem was there are languages where they need to use Shift to be able to type more letters (Thai for example), so it wouldn't let them type other languages. I could probably add it as an option though, but you wouldn't be able use capital letters, naturally heh
A menu bar icon would be appreciated!
Small suggestion: In the case of selecting an item that's not the topmost, it would be nice if it was a one-step process rather than two (you need to first highlight with ctrl+letter, then activate with Enter).
Maybe a repeated press of ctrl+letter could actually activate the selection. Or maybe pressing and holding ctrl+letter for a short while.
I could not figure out how to click an element when using . to highlight all elements.
I'm based out of Canberra at the moment, but it's great to see local guys pop up on HN occasionally.
EDIT: On further inspection of README this is somewhat covered. /sleepy
/missed something obvious
That said, the video screencast doesn't show up in firefox sans flash player. Not a huge deal but thought you might want to know.
As others already suggested, the possibility of directly activating a specific element by shortcut would be great. Awesome app nonetheless!
I've already been doing something like this in browsers for some time:
Cmd+F
Type
Enter/Shift+Enter to go next/prev result (or Cmd+G/Cmd+Shift+G)
When it highlights the link you want to press: Esc, Enter
Of course the beauty of this app is that it works outside the browser too.
Bonus: the cat is absolutely cute :)
I've found that most mail clients (apart from Mail.app, which I don't like) have pretty terrible Accessibility support, due to heavy emphasis on custom views. It's still possible to add Accessibility support on custom views though, but visually-impaired users tends to be a pretty small niché unfortunately...
If it gets more app developers to support it (even if it's because their users want to use power tools like this), then indirectly, much good will be done for the users who need Accessibility support for its intended purpose. Definitely a win all around.
command+shift+}
?